Hey, so I’ve set myself a challenge to take the usual hero’s palette, blue and gold. How do I subvert it, with minor touches? Cygnar is the idea, but what if I wanted to take the classic scheme and make the shades work for something like Everblight or Skorne?
Perhaps Blighted gold or similar for golds, and a paler or a slightly desaturated blue would work? Or alternatively, take the blue towards a very dark (“Exile”) blue.
When I think of bad guys wearing blue and gold, I imagine something like the Thousand Sons from Warhammer 40,000. Maybe you could draw some inspiration from there?
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Perhaps using a lot of gold for armour and suchlike, shaded to black (rather than a purple or red) to give it a darker, older look, and maybe using blue for organic materials (skin, flesh, blood, bile) to make it look inhuman? Working green into either can potentially create a sinister look. Red or magenta as a glow colour of course will suggest malevolence (whilst still working with both gold and blue).
Also, think about the lighting. Lots of darkness, possibly underlit, could make everything more sinister?
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I almost want to say, that’s above my skill level. But I like the idea of doing a gradient almost…black to blue.
I was thinking a dirty gold, as well. A gold that start from a rucksack tan or moldy ochre?
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My Warcaster Aeternus Continuum cultists are Blue (and Blue Grey) with gold/yellow glow and I’ve been told they look pretty evil. A dark palette, with pale supplementary colors rather than contrasts and a cold light, work great for this.
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What were the paints you used, if you don’t mind sharing?
If you’re painting NMM, Moldy Ochre is perfect. If you’re using metallic golds and want a “dirty” look, I’d start with a darker brown base (perhaps Umbral Umber) and layer the gold on that. Then shade (just wash if you’re lazy) with greens and purples.
Metallic paints, especially P3 metallic paints, are very shiny, so you want to get rid of most of that shine for a dirty gold look. This can be easily achieved by a couple of very thin glazes of green, purple or brown. (You may not want to use inks for this glaze, as those tend to have a shiny aftereffect.) Afterwards, you can put some extreme highlights to the golden bits with the metallic paint to return some of that shine to parts that would reflect the most light, for some dramatic contrast.
The deep blue is something I make with Mixing Mediums from this: Fluid Acrylic Color - Anthraquinone Blue and mixing mediums. The Blue grey is P3 Trollblood Base and the darker weapons that are not metallic are based on P3 Coal Black . Glow is P3 Hearthfire with a spot of Vallejo Fluo (dropping this for Vallejo Bright Orange or P3 Ember Orange in the future, as it really doesn’t pop for me) The Purple is an eclectic mix of Vallejo, GW and P3 purples that mostly get the same result even if I use different stuff every time, but I’ll probably just fall back into P3 Beaten Purple because it works fine 
I also use a lot of Liquitex Titanium White Acrylic Ink for the upper highlights to get strong contrasts.
I’m moving on to the Cadre as an Xmas painting project now as well as the Scythe, so hopefully there is more AC in the immediate future.
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